1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to information processing apparatuses and methods and to programs for controlling the information processing apparatuses and methods, and more particularly, to an information processing apparatus and method suitable for performing dialogue processing on natural language text input by users and to a program for controlling such information processing apparatus and method.
2. Description of the Related Art
Representation in a frame format has been used for natural language dialogue processing. For example, as described in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2001-22779, dialogue processing has been performed by extracting information necessary for representation in a frame format from text input by users using general natural language processing, such as syntax and semantic parsing, in dialogue processing apparatuses.
In addition, as described in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2003-228575, a dialogue system capable of processing input text using examples, without using natural language processing based on general rules, such as grammar, is known. For example, in such a dialogue system, examples stored in advance in the system are searched for in accordance with characters input by a user, and the found examples are presented to the user. Then, the user selects a most suitable example from among the presented examples, so that the user can finally acquire a desired search result.